Last to Leave the Room is available now!
St Martins Press
The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before - and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world. With her employer growing increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…
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“A taut, ominous gothic that plays with preconceptions of gender and genre alike. Starling illuminates her characters brilliantly, and isn’t afraid of the dark corners behind them. This book runs like clockwork — but it’s unpredictable too, unnervingly so, like a machine finely calibrated to self-destruct. It reads like Shirley Jackson writing an episode of Severance.”
